A frame story is a story within a story. Maybe the most famous is One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales framed by a story about a sultan who, in order to relieve the pain of his first wife's infidelity, decides to marry a new virgin each day, sleep with her that night, then have her executed the next morning before she has a chance to cheat on him. After a few years of the sultan's madness, the realm is almost out of virgins. The court frantically wonders what to do, when Scheherazade, the daughter of the grand vizier and a virgin, offers herself to the sultan. Her father objects, but she has a plan. On the night of the wedding, after her deflowering, she beguiles the sultan with a compelling story. It is too long to finish in one evening, so she promises to continue it the next night. The sultan is so engrossed by his wife's endless story that night after night he implores her to continue, each time extending her life by one day.
Just like Scheherazade's, our stories interlock with frames that turn like gears, promoting the arrow of time with beginning, middle and hopefully end.
On December 26, 2004, my story was that I was camping in Death Valley, and the frame was the life in Los Angeles I had left behind, but when the car radio reported that a giant tsunami had killed 200,000 people near Indonesia, that became the main story of the world, framing mine and everyone's stories.
The opposite would have happened- my world would have shrunk- if Ubehebe Crater, a few miles from my camp, had erupted that morning, as it did thousands of years ago in a phreatic rage that dug a hole 777 feet deep. The shock wave would have flattened the camp, eliminating the tsunami entirely from my frame, diminishing the world to a few local square miles.
There was frame shrinkage in Los Angeles after the magnitude 6.7 earthquake in 1994. Earlier that week, an L.A. Times headline read, "Serbs' heavy weapons pound Sarajevo." Before the earthquake, that seemed like a relevant topic; after the earthquake there was almost no consciousness of war in Sarajevo because our frame story did not extend beyond our city.
In the last few months a number of events have been powerful enough to attract worldwide attention and frame everyone's story. Often these frames had the stage to themselves for a few days, so the whole world could think about them and decide what if any action to take. Some were conflicts, e.g. Israel vs. Palestinians; Russia vs. Ukraine; Armenia vs. Azerbaijan; Myanmar, China and maybe all governments to varying degrees vs. elements of their own people. Some were slow-moving but threatening, like climate change. Some were medical tragedies, like India's lack of oxygen for covid victims; some were natural, like several powerful volcanic eruptions. Each defined a global frame story.
Our minds are accustomed to alternating between global frame stories and local ones, but disasters of a type that formerly might have captured world attention are hitting the human sphere with such regularity and frequency that everyone's frame story is at risk of shrinking down to their immediate environment. If the time comes when every place on Earth hosts a catastrophe such that everyone's frame story becomes local, we will experience mass, unconscious censorship.
Such censorship happened in a limited way on January 6, 2021, when Business Weekly broke the news about possibly dangerous covid variants. The story was urgent enough, you would think, to frame and reorder our lives, but because of the D.C. insurgency on the same day, covid news seemed trifling, out of the frame.
In most populated areas it wouldn't take more than a disabled Internet to shrink everyone's frame story down to their visible world. Adding a few more calamities- like failure of a power grid or a new pandemic- could force a reversion to the provincialism of the agricultural Middle Ages, when most people stayed within forty miles of home their whole lives, and information about the world was rumor.
The tendency of disasters to limit broader perspectives renders them useful to those who might want to curtail the population's worldview and ability to influence events. Even earthquakes and hurricanes are suspect, at least if you believe magazines available in City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco which claim that the CIA has an earthquake producing machine and that China can control the weather. I have not seen allegations that volcanic eruptions can be induced, but how hard could it be?
We seem poised to enter a period of increased catastrophes and shrunken world-views. At its most extreme, a shrunken world-view translates to a total lack of influence on one's surroundings and society. For now, through voting and regular pummeling of newspapers with letters to the editor, we have the illusion of influence. The illusion may pass.
People will look for ways to stay sane as our frame stories shrink. Some will find solace in religion and worship. Some will read novels or watch movies. Some will study their own dreams.
In my case, I have a fantasy that there will be a new American political party based on the reality of our shifting world. This party will expand people's frame stories beyond the purview of local catastrophe. It will produce strong feelings of trust. People will think the party is speaking to them, that it is authentic. I know what you're thinking: "Don't hold your breath." But I am holding my breath.
